My claim is I’m more worried than you about gender pay gap. And that’s even if you’re one of the women complaining about it. You see we’re in the middle of a collective delusion with people simply not willing to even try and understand what is going on.
In the airline industry there are more male pilots than female, and pilots are paid what pilots get. Then there are more female stewardesses than male stewards. This produces, in raw figures of average male and female pay, a pay gap, but it’s not discrimination. It’s just that men and women are, for one reason or another, doing different jobs.
If employers look at potential employees and cackle with glee as they say, “That’s a woman, pay her less!” then we’ve got a problem, and not only a problem but a problem we’d better do something about.
If the difference in average wages is a result of a difference in the way that men and women run their lives then it’s not obvious that we have a problem. And if there’s no problem then obviously we don’t need any public policy to deal with it.
The only answer that makes any sense is to agree that we’re dealing with men and women. When we look through this lens, we find our little secret: men and women tend to react differently to the arrival of their little ones. That then explains all of the other things we can observe.
I know a househusband and he’s simply wonderful in how he’s living his life. I also know a number of women who took career breaks to raise their children, suffered damage to their careers and still think they got the best end of the bargain. As for those who don’t want to sacrifice their careers, I know some of them too.
Basically, no one denies the existence of the pay gap. What we’re all trying to do is explain why it exists. The mere attempt to explain the gender pay gap is an agreement that the pay gap exists. Women, on average, get paid less than men. The reason appears to be not discrimination by employers but discrimination by mothers about how they prefer to run their families.
We could even accuse the patriarchy, and all the rest of it, that is causing it. Yet it’s the reaction to being a parent which has become the generally accepted explanation of why more women than men become the primary child carers. Why? Because it is what the majority do; it’s the general expectation of how life is going to work out.
We are seeing people finally arguing that the pay gap is going to persist until men take an equal share of child caring responsibilities. But let’s say that’s not enough. The answer is either half the men need to become househusbands or half the women work like men do now. Or to spread it all more equally, all men could do half the child-raising, take half the career breaks, and carry half of the load of career restrictions due to child-raising. Good luck in engineering society to that model if that’s what you want.
The reality is more women would like to do this than men. From that, all else flows, so when do we think this preference is going to end? My own estimation is that the preference will never change, which is a bit of a problem in any attempt to close the gender pay gap.
And finally, we can (of course we can) still complain. But then again, if mothers still tend to be the primary child carers then any move to change the situation needs to alter parenting, shouting about employers won’t make much difference.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the New Sarawak Tribune.
